Path 2

Path 2

Wednesday

April 15, 2008

Peter Lorre and Evelyn Keyes in The Face Behind the MaskColumbia Pictures/Photofest/BAM

[FILM]

FAVORITE FIEND

As part of his ongoing Cinemachat series at BAM, film historian and critic Elliott Stein takes us back to the days of Old Hollywood with a Peter Lorre Double Bill, featuring The Face Behind the Mask (1941) and Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). Stein has described the great character actor—best known for his roles as shady or downright criminal opportunists in films like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca—as an artist with “two faces . . . who achieved fame with a delicate balance between good and evil.” In The Face Behind the Mask, Lorre plays a kind-hearted, hardworking immigrant who loses everything after his face is ravaged by a fire and turns to crime as a means for survival. He shows his more sinister side as an eerie-looking throat-slicing serial killer in Stranger on the Third Floor, considered to be the very first noir film. A Q&A with Stein follows. At 7, BAM, Peter Jay Sharp Building, 30 Lafayette Street, 718-636-4100, $11 EUDIE PAK

[MUSIC]

ROBOPOP

T-Pain in the flesh

His chart reign has flagged a bit in ’08, and artists as diverse as Britney Spears and Snoop Dog have shamelessly co-opted his auto-tuned style, but T-Pain‘s status as hip-hop’s top hookman remains secure. His most memorable turns have been on other rappers’ songs, so tonight, expect an avalanche of surprise guests and, perhaps, a preview of his forthcoming 3 Rings, which is set to drop on his birthday in September. In a dying record industry, it’s perhaps upsetting that one of our biggest remaining stars impersonates a robot—so come, if only to verify that he’s human after all. At 8, Nokia Theater Times Square, 1515 Broadway, 212-930-1950, $38.50–$40 ZACH BARON

[DANCE]

SECOND THAT EMOTION

Movement that just might compel you

Choreographer Zvi Gotheiner’s work can go from the deeply personal (without seeming too self-centered) to humorous in a matter of seconds. In his latest spring show with his 10-member company Zvidance, the Israeli expat pays homage to his mentor, Gertrude Haus (1901–1977), in the return of 2007’s Gertrude (in which his dancers share passages of her wisdom and teachings)—and then, for something lighter, switches over to the notion of how we gussy ourselves up to get a date in the premiere of Personals. It should be a fun, thought-provoking program that blends spoken word and dance under the light of video projections, with music by Nick Cave, Tuxedomoon, Robert Schumann, and Scott Killian. At 8, Ailey Citigroup Theater, 405 West 55th Street, 212-868-4444, smarttix.com, $18–$20 KEISHA FRANKLIN